Students say it’s time for this university to acknowledge its ties to slavery

ST. LOUIS — Descendants of people enslaved by Saint Louis University are asking the administration to take formal steps toward acknowledging its history, including issuing a formal apology.

The new 10-point plan from the Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved (DSLUE) also urges the university to create a memorial to commemorate enslaved ancestors and establish an endowment to issue cash payments to “restore to the descendants the economic benefit they were deprived of.” It’s part of a renewed push for the administration to take action after years of advocacy by the descendants and the local community.

Students passed a resolution last month asking the university to outline an action plan, and in a letter to DSLUE, St. Louis County NAACP president Adolphus M. Pruitt II threw support behind “the call for Saint Louis University (SLU) and the Society of the Jesuits (Society) to further acknowledge the harm that was inflicted upon these individuals and their descendants as a foundation for reconciliation and healing.”

The remedies, laid out by the descendants, also call for a focus on scholarships including tuition, room, board, fees, books and other related expenses for DSLUE descendants who seek to attend the school as well as entrepreneurial resources.

This, as the descendents pointed out, is consistent with was has been done at other universities including Princeton Theological Seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary and Loyola University Maryland.

READ MORE: Descendants of those enslaved by St. Louis University calculated their ancestors’ unpaid labor. Here’s how

“Saint Louis University has an opportunity to live up to their creed,” DSLUE executive director and founder Robin Proudie said.

Saint Louis University did not respond to a request for comment on the student resolution or a timeline for meeting the steps it lays out.

What are descendants and students asking for?

DSLUE’s Robin Proudie holds a doll she says symbolizes her ancestor Henrietta Mills, who was enslaved by Saint Louis University enslaved in the 1800s. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour

Robin Proudie walked into Saint Louis University’s student center last month with a doll in her hand. Draped in kente cloth, the doll held a baby on her back. She symbolized Proudie’s ancestor Henrietta Mills, who was enslaved by the university in the 1800s. Proudie was on campus to speak to students about the descendants’ history and their work, and wanted a way for Mills to bear witness to the work she’s doing on her behalf.

“To let her know that your great, great, great, great grand baby is out here speaking up for you so that you will not be a nameless soul,” she said.

The university’s Student Government Association passed a resolution the same day, asking it to take action and reconcile its ties to slavery .

“It humbled me,” Proudie said. “It made me so proud of those young, brilliant leaders. They were crying. Some students were crying.”

“I think especially on SLU, on campus, there’s a sense of importance to our role as students because we know that we are more than just students, that we are people who have a voice and have feelings as well,” said Luke Busboom, speaker of the Senate for the student body.

Both Proudie and the students say they have both been in contact with the university since the resolution passed.

Similar student movements nationwide

The resolution comes after the descendants worked with an economist to release a dollar estimate of their ancestors’ unpaid labor.

According to the calculation, the total wealth acquired from stolen labor, including the construction of the Jesuit institution, was between $361 million and $70-plus billion.

“Our ancestors deserve to be taken from the darkness and brought into the light,” Proudie said during the announcement in February.

This latest effort comes at the heels of movements at other universities across the country, including Georgetown University, which in 2015 had to confront its own participation in the enslavement of hundreds of Black people.

“During that time, there were almost a hundred universities where students were protesting around the renaming of schools and, in honor of people who were enslavers or people who were involved in Jim Crow,” Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor, said.

READ MORE: At least 70 people were enslaved by the Jesuits in St. Louis. Descendants are now telling their stories

At the time, Georgetown students held a sit-in protest in front of the university president’s office.

Hansford, who taught at SLU for several years and earned his law degree at Georgetown, also pointed to other student-led protests in recent years at Yale and Harvard, among other schools.

Yale had a building named after John Calhoun, an alumnus and former vice president who was an ardent supporter of slavery, while “University of Missouri had a major, major protest there at that time and all that came right in the middle of the protests that were happening in Ferguson,” said Hansford, also the executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center.

Student protests would continue in the years after. Students at Georgetown voted to impose a fee on themselves in 2019 that would pay for reparations for the school’s slavery ties. About three years later, the university created a fund to award $400,000 annually to community-based projects that supported descendants of people enslaved on Jesuit plantations in Maryland.

For Hansford, students’ collective action shows the power young people have in moving the needle throughout history.

“The big takeaway is that you need to listen to the students and really understand that the students are our moral compass as a society,” he said. “They’re young and idealistic, they’re thinking about these issues more often than some adults.”

What’s next

Saint Louis University has named a point of contact in the president’s office, as well as with the university’s new vice president of special projects. These contacts have held two initial meetings with the descendants and their representatives, said Areva Martin, one of the lead attorneys representing DSLUE, said in a release.

“Although we’ve yet to receive a commitment from the school, we are encouraged by their outreach and are hopeful they will honor their mission and repair the harms done by quickly adopting this plan,” she said.

Samarya Hall, the group’s vice president of communications and internal affairs, was one of the students who got emotional after the vote.

“I think I was honestly in awe of the resilience of our people as Black people in America. We have experienced such hatred, and abuse and neglect by the powers that be,” she said. “But despite it, we thrive. We find joy, we love, and we continue living.”

In the end, Proudie said, seeing the student’s engaged affirmed that the work she was doing went far beyond her own family. “This is not just about families, the survivors,” she said. It’s about the community.

“It is about all of us who are descendants, who have ancestors who helped to build this university, this city, this community and this nation. And we are doing this for all of us.”